African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  The best of the Zimbabwe story is the vigour, the optimism, the determination of the people. You may return from a several-weeks’ visit to Zimbabwe and realize, finding yourself again in the enervating airs of Europe, that you have been day and night with people, white and black, who talk of nothing else but how to make Zimbabwe work, of new ideas that may be adopted there, and who have an identification with the processes of government and of administration that means nothing can happen which does not at once attract the most passionate reactions, for or against. People coming to Zimbabwe after Mozambique, or Zambia, where nothing is a success, where cynicism poisons everything, say their faith in Africa is restored, and that Zimbabwe, for whatever reason, is unique in Africa because of the creative energies of its people. They are proud of themselves…thus you may hear a black person remark of Zambia, or of Mozambique: ‘They don’t know how to do anything, we shall have to show them.’ This self-respecting, or perhaps one might say, bumptious, attitude is a continuation of the Southern Rhodesian white love of themselves and ‘their’ country, which goes on though the country is no longer theirs. Talking of a success in South Africa, some new enterprise, or farm, you may hear a white remark: ‘Of course the Rhodies down South are bound to come out on top: we know how to do things.’

  Before Independence the whites were all convinced that Southern Rhodesia was the best place on earth, and their administration better than that of any other white-dominated country. During my trip in 1989 I kept hearing that so and so had said (notably President Chissano to President Mugabe): ‘You were lucky to have had the British, at least they leave behind a decent infrastructure.’

  1982

  When I returned to the country where I had lived for twenty-five years, arriving as a child of five and leaving as a young woman of thirty, it was after an interval of over twenty-five years. This was because I was a Prohibited Immigrant. An unambiguous status, one would think: either a good citizen or a bad one, Prohibited or Unprohibited. But it was not so simple. I was already a Prohibited Immigrant in 1956 but did not know it. It never crossed my mind I could be: the impossibility was a psychological fact, nothing to do with daylight realities. You cannot be forbidden the land you grew up in, so says the web of sensations, memories, experience, that binds you to that landscape. In 1956 I was invited to go to the Prime Minister’s office. This was Garfield Todd. Striding about an office he clearly felt confined him, a rugged and handsome man in style rather like Abraham Lincoln, he said, ‘I have stretched my hand over you, my child.’ He was then ten years older than I was. I attributed his proprietorial’ style to the fact he had been a missionary, and did not really hear what he was saying: he was welcoming me to Southern Rhodesia because he knew I could give Federation a good write-up. ‘I have let you in…’ I said I could not approve of Federation. We argued energetically and with good feeling for a couple of hours. Later I asked to interview Lord Malvern who, as Doctor Huggins, had been the family doctor, and told him I wanted to visit Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, then full of riots, dissidents, social disorder, and other manifestations of imminent Independence. He said, ‘Oh you do, do you!’ During the course of arguments much less good-natured than those with Garfield Todd, he said, ‘I wasn’t going to have you upsetting our natives.’ I still did not hear what was being said. Finally he said I could go to Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland for two weeks. ‘I don’t suppose you can do much harm in that time.’ It goes without saying this flattered me: people who see themselves as recorders and observers are always surprised to be seen as doers and movers. (These long-ago events are of interest now only when I try to come to terms with the irrationality of my reactions.) I came back to London and then began to think there was something here I could be seeing. That I had been Prohibited in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, countries where I had never been, did not affect me, but I could not ‘take in’ the fact that I could be Prohibited in the country I had been brought up in. At last I asked a lawyer to come with me to Southern Rhodesia House where an official, peevish with what he clearly felt was a false position, said, ‘Oh drat it, you have forced my hand.’ In this way was I finally informed that I was a Prohibited Immigrant. Prime Minister Huggins had ruled long ago, when I left home to come home, that I must not be allowed to upset his natives.*

  As the convention was, I was proud to be Prohibited. Since then it has become clear that countries with the levels of purity of motive high enough to match our idea of ourselves as world citizens are not many.

  I did not want to live in Southern Rhodesia, for if its climate was perfection, probably the finest in the world, and its landscape magnificent, it was provincial and tedious. I wanted to live in London. What this Prohibition amounted to was that I would be prevented from visiting relatives and friends. They, however, might visit London. These rational considerations did not reach some mysterious region of myself that was apparently an inexhaustible well of tears, for night after night I wept in my sleep and woke knowing I was unjustly excluded from my own best self. I dreamed the same dream, night after night. I was in the bush, or in Salisbury, but I was there illegally, without papers. ‘My’ people, that is, the whites, with whom after all I had grown up, were coming to escort me out of the country, while to ‘my’ people, the blacks, amiable multitudes, I was invisible. This went on for months. To most people at some point it comes home that inside our skins we are not made of a uniform and evenly distributed substance, like a cake-mix or mashed potato, or even sadza, but rather accommodate several mutually unfriendly entities. It took me much longer to ask myself the real question: what effect on our behaviour, our decisions, may these subterranean enemies have? That lake of tears, did it slop about, or seep, or leak, secretly making moist what I thought I kept dry?

  Now I see that refusal, that inability to ‘take in’ my exclusion, as a symptom of innate babyishness: mine, and, too, the inhabitants of privileged countries, safe countries, for there are more and more people in the world who have had to leave, been driven from, a country, the valley, the city they call home, because of war, plague, earthquake, famine. At last they return, but these places may not be there, they have been destroyed or eroded; for if at first glance, like a child’s recognition of its mother’s face when she has been absent too long, everything is as it was, then slowly it has to be seen that things are not the same, there are gaps and holes or a thinning of the substance, as if a light that suffused the loved street or valley has drained away. Quite soon the people who have known one valley or town all their lives will be the rare ones, and there are even those who speculate how humanity will have to leave the planet with plans to return after an interval to allow it to regenerate itself, like a sick or poisoned organism, but when they return after long generations they find…

  AIR ZIMBABWE

  In 1982 I booked the seat on Air Zimbabwe, made arrangements, with more than usually mixed feelings.

  As I seated myself inappropriate emotions began, all much too strong. For a start, the stewardesses were black, once impossible. Since nearly all the passengers were white, and these black girls had no reason to expect courtesy from them, they were defensive and would not look at anyone. The atmosphere was unpleasant. I had hoped to sit next to a black person, so as to hear what was being thought, but was beside a white race-horse owner, a man of forty or so, who grumbled obsessively for the ten hours of the flight about the new black government. I had heard this note of peevish spite before: at the Independence celebrations in Zambia the white officials of an administration which had done nothing to train blacks for responsibility, recited examples of inefficiency while their faces shone with triumphant malice. Here it was again. This man insisted in one sentence that this was still God’s Own Country, and he could raise and train race-horses more cheaply and better here than anywhere in the world; he and his family enjoyed a wonderful life and he wouldn’t leave for anything–but the black government…I listened with half an ear, thinking that soon, when I had paid my dues to the white wor
ld, I could leave it and find out about the new Zimbabwe. Meanwhile I disliked this man with an impatience identical to that I had felt all those years ago, growing up here. Childish, spoiled, self-indulgent, spiteful…yes, he was all this, they were all like this, or most of them, but what of it, and why should I remain so involved?

  While he grumbled about the deprivations they suffered in the way of food, breakfast was served, slabs of bacon, scrambled eggs, sausages, fried bread, a meal to fuel farm labourers or gravediggers.

  The little airport was unchanged: I hardly saw it. The smells, the colours of the earth had undone me, and my emotional balance was gone. Immigration was a shy young man, hesitant, inexperienced, who asked if I planned to come and live here now: too many of ‘our friends’ had left because of the old government. He enquired about my passport: for I had been born in Persia, and I explained that one could–loosely–equate Persia and Iran with Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. When I changed my money at the airport bank the official asked if I was the author and welcomed me in the name of Zimbabwe. I went out into the dry scented air and wept. And there was the young man who had brought the hired car to the airport. So occupied was I in admonishing my tear-ducts that I hardly saw the streets. I left the young man at the car-hire firm and parked. I was on my own in the streets of the town that was once my big city.

  THE BIG CITY

  Of course the old one-horse one-storey town had gone…though everywhere bits of that town survived among the new tall buildings. What was wrong? Something was–the atmosphere? Yes, it was cold, being winter, and dry, and the skies sparkled with a thin sunshine. There were few people about, and they moved slowly, without animation. A pavement café had customers, not many, and they were all white, and seemed defensive. As I walked about, feeling more dismal every minute, I was accosted by beggars, the wounded from the War. They were aggressive and abusive, thrusting out stumps of arms and legs, and when given a little money, they shook it about in their palms, as if rejecting it, full of hatred. I went into Meikles bar. The hotel, being unique and full of character, had been pulled down and in its place was one exactly the same as many thousands of others, all over the world. That ‘they’ could have destroyed Meikles made me feel as helplessly angry as we all do when ‘they’ pull down buildings anywhere. ‘Well, it was a mistake,’ we know they will soon say airily. The old hotel appears in photographs around the walls of the bar. I felt as if I belonged in those photographs, and could easily have begun surreptitiously to examine them for faces I knew, or even myself, a young woman. I left Meikles, mourning, and went into a bookshop. The young man who came forward was so aggressive I knew at once how white people entered that shop. I asked for novels and stories written by black writers, and he found them for me, never once looking at me, or smiling. I said I was a writer whose books he might even be selling, but he did not ask the name so I told him. He was suspicious, doubtful, then was transformed into a friend. He said he had read one of my short stories. ‘Are you coming back to live? All the good white people left in the War.’ I said I was visiting.

  And who was I visiting? Hard-line whites, who, if they came into this shop at all, being a black enterprise, would behave as they always had. We said goodbye with cautious goodwill, as if bombs lingered somewhere close, and might do us both in at one wrong word.

  I decided to leave Harare. I had been in it for less than a morning, and everything about it chilled and dispirited me, and not only because I felt like a sad ghost.

  I will say now what the matter was, though it was not that day or the next that I came to the obvious diagnosis. This was a town still recovering from the War. The country had been at war for over ten years, the War had ended two years before. It is not possible to fight this kind of war, a civil war, without the poisons going deep. When I went to Pakistan to visit Afghan refugees and the mujahideen, there was the same atmosphere. Something has been blasted or torn deep inside people, an anger has gone bad, and bitter, there is disbelief that this horror can be happening at all. A numbness, a sullenness, shows itself in a slowness of movement, of reactions.

  I went to old Cecil Square, named after the Cecil family and Lord Salisbury, to buy flowers. Really, I wanted to talk to the flower sellers. They were all men, as they had been long ago, but different now, for they crowded around, thrusting the flowers just as the beggars had thrust their wounds, into my face. There were too many flower sellers, and these were hard times, with so few tourists, and they had to sell their flowers. When I said no, two bunches were enough, the sellers who had not been favoured were angry, with the same unconcealed, as it were licensed, anger, as the beggars.

  I put the flowers in the back seat of the car and drove east on the old road to Umtali.

  THE BUSH

  The family went often to Marandellas, whose name is now again Marondera, just as the real right name for Umtali would have been Mutare, if the whites had not overrun these parts. We did not go to Umtali, for it was then a distant place. I did not get to it until I was fifteen or so, and then Marandellas had become only one of the way-stations along a road where I visited farms, sometimes for weeks at a time. But as a child, Marandellas was the other pole to our farm, which was in the District of Banket, Lomagundi (or Lo Magondi) seventy miles to the north-east of Salisbury, and on the road north to the Zambesi valley. Nothing ever happened on our road but the routine excitements of flooded rivers, where we might have to sit waiting for the waters to subside for four or five hours before daring the drift that could have potholes in it from the flood; or getting stuck in thick red mud and having to be pushed out over freshly cut branches laid across the mud; or glimpses of wild animals…‘Look, there’s a duiker!’ Or a koodoo, or a little herd of eland. These being the stuff of ordinary life, and what we took for granted, it was only on the other side of Salisbury that the shock and tug of new impressions began, a shimmer in the air, like mental heat waves, which I knew were proper to the road to Umtali. Marandellas was about fifty miles south-east of Salisbury, but if you ask, What is a hundred and twenty miles?–then that is from the practical, unpoetical perspective. Our car was an Overland, contemporary with the first Fords, now taken out of car museums to star in films of the Great Depression. It was second-hand when we bought it, and thirty miles an hour was a great speed. Add this to the characters of my parents, and the journey became an epic endeavour, to be planned and prepared for weeks in advance. The most often spoken words in our house were, ‘But we can’t afford it!’–usually, triumphantly, from my father to my mother, to prove something was impossible, in this case to spend a week near Ruzawi at the Marandellas Hotel. My brother was at Ruzawi School, a prep-school conducted on English lines, and the trip would be so we could take part in a Sports Day, an Open Day, a cricket match, judged as successful according to how they mirrored similar events at prep-schools at Home. Impossible!–thank the Lord!–and he would not have to leave the farm and put on respectable clothes instead of his farm khaki and make small talk with other parents. For his ‘We can’t afford it,’ was not a symptom of meanness, but rather of his need, by now the strongest thing in him, to be left in peace to dream.

  But my mother triumphed. Rolls of bedding, boxes of food, suitcases, filled the back of the car where the ‘boy’ and I fitted ourselves, and we set off. At the speed my father insisted on travelling, the seventy miles to Salisbury took three or four hours. (‘A man who has to use a brake doesn’t know how to drive a car.’) The Packards and the Studebakers shot past us in tumults of dust (these were the old strip roads and you overtook on dirt) for the Fords and the Overlands were already an anachronism. (‘Why give up your car when it is still working perfectly well just because they want to sell you a new one?’) To go from Banket to Marandellas in one day, or an afternoon, even on those roads, was easily done–by everyone else. We stayed at the old Meikles Hotel, but in the annex at the back, because it was cheaper. We ate a picnic supper in our room, because we could not afford the hotel dining-room. Afterwards we drank
coffee in Meikles lounge, where a band played among palm trees and gilded columns.

  Next morning, the car forced to accommodate even more food, we left early on the road to Marandellas, so there would be plenty of time to set up camp. The drive went on for ever, the miles made longer by the need to concentrate on everything. This is sandveld country, not the heavy red, brown and bright pink soils of Banket, and the landscape has a light dry airiness. Mountains and more mountains accompany the road, but at distances that paint them blue, mauve, purple, while close to the road are clusters of granite boulders unique in the world; at least, I have not seen anything like them elsewhere, or in photographs. The boulders erupt from pale soil to balance on each other so lightly it seems impossible a strong wind will not topple them. The great stones, a light bright grey, with a sparkle to them if you look close, but patched and patterned with lichens, radiate heat waves against the intense blue of the sky. Everyone who passes speculates about how long they have impossibly balanced there and enjoy notions of giants who have played with pebbles. ‘That one, there,’ I would think, fixing its exact shape and position in my mind, ‘it might have fallen off by the time we come back next week.’ But that boulder, the size of a hut or a baobab tree, contacting the one beneath it only for a square inch or two, had won the battle against gravity, and was still there in 1982 on that day I sped past on the road, not to Marandellas and Umtali, but to Marondera and Mutare, after so many rain storms, powerful winds, bolts of lightning; after half a century of history and the years of the civil war: the War of Liberation, the Bush War.